It must have been difficult for the mother to have turned in her children to the police. Considering that it can have negative effects on their future, probably tagging them as juvenile deliquents thereon. I don't blame the parents of these kids for all their wrong doings since there are also other factors which may have triggered them to do such things, the wrong circle of friends, perhaps. 

As embarassing as it may seem, I find mothers like Kassy as inspiration because she didn't let her kids get away with any crime unpaid in spite of her love for them. It really doesn't mean that if you send your kids away to be reformed that you already gave up on them even if you consider this thought. Breaking the law is something grave, and those who do it should always be ready for the consequences. I hope the experience will teach these kids a lesson. 

Jul 11, 2011 -- 10:31PM, Ebon wrote:

Maine and pieces, thank you and you're very welcome.

Jul 11, 2011 -- 8:36PM, jane2 wrote:

Those youngsters in the video were creating absolute havoc in the store. They weren't just pinching a candy-bar or a bag of chips. They were destructive and meant to be. This wasn't penny-ante behavior. Perhaps the mother who turned them into the police did the best she could under the circumstances.

As I said, I can't view the video because I'm stuck using my SO's PC for at least the next four days. To be honest, it's really impossible to say what their parenting was like.

What I do see is a lack of social services and sports and other programs. But that would raise taxes and no conservative would buy into that.

True, both would help no end. Social clubs, such as sports clubs, provide some sense of structure and, something else which is important to the teenage psyche, real measurable results that you can see happening (teenagers are often not good as long-range planning both from lack of experiance and because hormones mean they literally perceive time differently from adults). Church youth groups are often only open to members of that church and/or preach too much to be appealing to a teenager.

We now have private prisons for hire, for crying out loud : profit motive involved. I know more about this than I would want to.

Which, since the state already does prisons about as cheaply as possible, means they have to cut corners to make a profit. That means less security, less rehab facilities and because prison corporations are corporations above all, it means they're going to be lobbying for more and longer prison sentences. I suspect you and I would agree on what an incredibly stupid and short-sighted move for-profit prisons are.

My younger daughter, now in her forties, mentioned recently how many books and mags she read at an early age because they were all over our home. She read TRINITY by Uris in the sixth grade and challenged her anglophile, idiot teacher about what the Brits did to the Irish. Her heritage is about 1/3 Irish and 2/3 Brit.

Fair enough, we did some truly terrible things to the Irish and we are sorry for that. That said, we have made some efforts toward fixing them in recent years.

Youngsters from various backgrounds need parenting that fits them. Some youngsters and their families need social services and programs.

That's something which a lot of people don't get: There is no one-size-fits-all solution. Different kids need different measures.

EDIT: No, that's not true. There is one measure which would help in every single case: TALK to your kids. I know that's difficult when you have a demanding job or maybe two or even three and I know that your kid might try and shrug you off but really and truly, I have never seen a single situation where communication made things worse and many where it made things better. Always talk to your kids, even if it's just about stupid crap like what they're watching on tv or what they're reading. It all helps your kid think of you as someone they can relate to, confide in and count on.

Jane, that last bit wasn't directed at you. You just happened to trigger my memory.

My dad's mother had a Brit background and we as a family never discussed Britain's brutality, especially during the famine. I don't harbor any anti-Brit feelings. Our younger daughter just decided to read TRINITY as one of many books hanging around our house--probably a book-club selection. She is very astute and again rising in a new corporate milieu after her extremely well-paid rise in a housing industry in Southern California--she works harder than most can and I do wonder about the cost to her.

This whole prisons for hire makes me crazy. In the beginning they hired men who had served in the US Bureau of Prisons--we knew many of them as extremely decent men. That no longer obtains. The US Bureau of Prisons was led in the main but very talented men and later women. My husband wrote much policy on Inmate Programs for ten years in the eighties. Prisons for hire today have no such committment and talent. Few even know these prisons for hire exist and fewer care.

My dad talked and reasoned with me from infancy. We did the same with our children and this is also the case with our grandchildren, a savvy lot. My grandkids and I have chatted about many things since they were tots.

ya know I enjoy your input.

Jane

Thank you Ebon, that was a wonderful post, and added to my closet of knowledge. Much appreciated.

Ebon,

good points about the internal and external confusion of the teenage years!  it served as a good reminder for me as i witness my daughters' entrance into teenage-hood. 

Erey,

cute stories.  :-)

and I agree, the mom did the right thing.

Jul 11, 2011 -- 4:36AM, Ebon wrote:

Jul 10, 2011 -- 8:04PM, mainecaptain wrote:

People used too, not that long ago,  be married and raise families by 15 years old. Has the human brain regressed over the years to even less maturity?

Not exactly but our culture infantalises teenagers. First off, remember that the concept of teenagers as a distinct life period is only about a century old in our culture. Prior to that, it was just children and adults. Secondly, our culture is somewhat scizophrenic with regard to teenagers. We give them some of the responsibilities of being adult but absolutely none of the freedoms that come with it. We expect teenagers to take on some of the responsibilities like respecting the law, planning their lives through selection of academic subjects (and even now, that seems insane to me) and, in the US, driving but we give them absolutely none of the freedoms of being an adult. They can't legally drink, smoke, shag, vote or even see an adult film. Is it any wonder that the teenage mind doesn't know what they're supposed to be? It doesn't help that our culture lacks a distinct coming-of-age ritual (such rituals actually help the adolescent mind to psychologically categorise themselves as an adult).

Also, while teenagers know right from wrong (in most cases), the pre-frontal cortex hasn't finished developing and that is, as far as we can tell, the part of the brain responsible for impulse control. In adults, that area acts to stop our momentary impulses from overruling our sense of right and wrong. Assuming your life is much the same as most of us, you're probably felt the occasional urge to throttle someone over some minor irritation. That's ok, most of us have felt the same urge on occasion. But in adults, the pre-frontal cortex cuts in and says "hang on, do you really want to do this?" and we don't do it. In teenagers, that hasn't finished developing yet so it doesn't always work properly and they do stupid stuff on occasion.

Finally, adolescent rebellion and this one is the most direct answer to your question. Contrary to the beliefs of most parents, teenagers don't rebel just to bedevil their parents. Rather, it's part of a very important psychological process of establishing yourself as an individual being seperate from your parents. As a child, you obey societal rules largely out of fear of punishment. On a sub-conscious level, you view yourself as an extension of your parents. Well, as we go through adolescence, we are psychologically working out an identity seperate from our parents, as an individual in our own right and part of that comes from making mistakes. In the times when you would have been an adult at that age, you still made the same mistakes (because teenagers lack both experiance and impulse control) but because you were considered a seperate being, it didn't reflect back on your parents. Today, because a teenager is likely to still be living with their parents and because our society is not quite sure how to deal with teenagers, legal infractions are actually a bigger deal than they once were. If you're a legal adult who commits a crime, no-one really cares. But if you're a teenager who commits such a crime these days, you get news coverage, people talk about you and start threads on message boards to talk about you and it becomes a bigger deal than it would have been a century ago.

If it helps any, crime has been gradually trending downward among teenagers for years.

Jul 10, 2011 -- 4:14PM, appy20 wrote:

I wouldn't have lived long enough to be turned in.  My mother would have killed me.  My brothers and I never took money out of my mother's purse without permission. I can't imagine us shoplifting.   Especially as teenagers.  By the teen years, we were expected to know how to behave. I have seen the science on teenage brains and am puzzled by it because most teenagers i knew did not do that kind of stuff and knew wrong from right.  All my friends and I knew what lines not to cross and were completely morally developed by the age of 12.  I think the science needs some more research in that area.

Appy, how old are you? I'm not being rude (at least, not deliberately) but it sounds like you were a teenager during a period when teenagers had much less freedom than they do currently and so, that confusion that I mentioned above, was less prevelent. You had much more structure which means, psychologically, you were more aware of your boundries. I was a teenager in the late eighties and early nineties and we broke the law sometimes. We drank underage, smoked pot, occasionally took other drugs and occasionally shoplifted. We weren't morally bad, for the most part, but we had much less of a sense of which societal rules did and did not apply to us because the process we were going through wasn't clear to us and our parents and guardians made our boundries deliberately hazy (parents universally do this in a subconscious effort to cover all their bases).

Understand, that not's to say that strict or permissive parenting is a good or bad thing (they both have their advantages and disadvantages) but teenagers do have a need to know and understand exactly what their boundries are. If they have lots of freedom, they need to understand that freedom comes with some responsibilities. If they have little freedom, then they can't be expected to suddenly develop responsibilities when they do something wrong. I'm of the opinion that most societal problems teenagers cause or are involved with come about because that trade-off of freedom/responsibilities is uneven: Either too many responsibilities, not enough freedoms or too many freedoms, not enough responsibilities (by which, we usually mean self-determination and the consequences thereof).

I was a teenager in the mid to late nineties and, yes, we engaged in some underage drinking and smoking pot, but that was the extent of it. Stealing was an absolute "no-no" and my parents would have turned me in. In fact, when I was 6, I took a little bouncy ball from a store (no concept that I was stealing anything) and when we got home and my mom saw it, she drove me right back to the store and made me give it to the manager and apologize to him.